Worth Waiting

"pretty Little Dolly' Nets An Unexpected Christmas Gift

Though most folks will be opening their presents today, for one Chicago performer the most coveted gift of the season turned up in the mail a few weeks ago.

It was small and weighed just a few ounces, but considering that singer Mona Abboud had been pursuing it for nearly three decades, its arrival amounted to something of a holiday miracle.

Fully 29 years earlier, in December 1966, Abboud had gotten the break of a lifetime. After struggling for years as a singer and comedy-sketch artist in New York, she had passed five auditions to win a guest spot on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson.

The show's staff had been seduced by her comic performance of a wickedly funny holiday song, "The Pretty Little Dolly." Written for Abboud (pronounced a-BOOD) by Jim Rusk, the novelty tune is sung from the point-of-view of a precocious 5-year-old telling Santa about the toy she wants for Christmas:

The pretty little dolly is so cute,

The pretty little dolly is so real.

If you take her out into the sun she burns.

And three days later she'll peel.

Before long, the 5-year-old is rhapsodizing about a doll that can go through puberty, wet its clothes and let out a big, shrieking cry. "If you put a plastic bag around her head," sings the little girl, "she'll choke, turn purple and die."

It may sound a bit tame today, but in 1966 the song had a decidedly sharp comic edge.

Nevertheless, performing it on "The Tonight Show," before a television audience of millions, was not easy.

"I couldn't believe I was on `The Tonight Show' with Johnny sitting right there next to me, looking so gorgeous in his blazer and his manicured nails, smelling so beautiful and sitting ramrod straight, sizing me up like a surgeon."

Abboud, in her 20s at the time, knew that this was going to be the make or break moment of her career. In the '60s, after all, Carson's show was in its ascendance, the place where most of America converged every night before nodding off to sleep.

When it came time for Abboud to sing her little ditty, she clutched a toy doll she had brought onstage as a prop and prayed for the best.

"The laughter grew steadily with each verse of the song," recalls Abboud, "and by the end, the audience got so hysterical I had to yell my last lines.

"As soon as it was over, I raced off the stage. (Actress) Eva Gabor was waiting backstage, with someone working on her hair and someone fixing her dress, and she said to me, `You were mahvelous.'

"(Opera singer) Roberta Peters came out of her dressing room to say, `That was fantastic.'

"It wasn't until later that night when I watched (the delayed) broadcast on TV that I realized how much Johnny had done to help my song go over. While I was singing, he was making faces, doing brilliant `takes.' It made all the lines funnier, it made me look better."

Abboud had her 15 minutes of fame. She married, moved to Chicago, had a child, divorced and launched a career as a commercial voiceover artist.

If her name and her face are unknown to most people, her voice has been heard by millions of listeners across the country. Radio ads for the Incredible Edible Egg and the Maytag Repairman, among thousands of others, have featured Abboud's protean instrument.

"She's really a virtuoso," says Jack Badofsky, of the Smith, Badofsky and Raffel advertising firm. Badofsky hired Abboud for the Irv's and Gum ads, among hundreds of others.

What Abboud didn't have, however, was a commercial recording of her fleeting moment in the spotlight. It took her 14 years to persuade NBC to allow her to release her "Tonight Show" version of "The Pretty Little Dolly," which she considered her best.

Because no major record company would pick up the tune, however, Abboud released it herself in 1980, with the help of former Chicago disc jockey Fred Winston. The 45 r.p.m. single has received a lot of airplay across the Midwest ever since, but it has long since vanished from record stores.

Until a few weeks ago, that is, when California-based Rhino Records picked up "The Pretty Little Dolly" as a track on Dr. Demento's "Holidays in Dementia" CD. Demento--a syndicated, Los Angeles-based disc jockey--has been playing Abboud's "Little Dolly" for years; its popularity led him to include it on his newest album.

When the CD arrived in Abboud's mailbox a few weeks ago, she immediately burst into tears.

"I never did have that career as a cabaret performer, but I do have this record, my only record," adds Abboud, who hopes that the recording may help jump-start her long-interrupted stage career.

The early indications look promising, considering that her single this year has been the most requested Christmas song on Bob Collins' morning show on WGN Radio.

Says Abboud, "This really validates my faith in that song, and that record." Not to mention the holiday spirit.